Carousel Party Invitations - OTT!

So Matilda will soon be celebrating her 5th Birthday - my word how time has flown.

Anyway, we've decided to tempt fate and plan for and outside party at the Botanical Gardens including a carousel ride on the Gallopers Carousel - believed to be the second oldest steam powered carousel in existence!

And in typical over-the-top-I-can-make-that style I have made invitations for the party with assistance from the birthday girl.

We cut paper, we stuck paper, we cut flags from the scraps and stuck those, we've licked envelopes and found stamps and hope that not too many people will be away for the school holidays!

All paper is by Cristina Re (from Officeworks) and the font used on the invite is Boopee.  The horse was a freebie off the internet with a black line drawn through the middle!

Now to stop procrastinating and finish my wretched thesis before next Monday.

Loving Rita @ Red Pepper

I have been following Rita's fabulous blog (Red Pepper Quilts) since almost the beginning.  She is a prolific quiltmaker and I love her quilt designs and the fabric combinations and the straight line quilting and everything!

Anyway, I was the lucky winner of a Pave the Way quilt kit (including backing and binding fabric). The Anna Maria Horner fabric is gorgeous and I'm itching to get cutting and stitching. So this will be my reward once I've finally finished my Case Study in Transport (yawn)!

I have snuck in a little bit of sewing and finished a couple of blocks for the last month of the Australasian Quilt Bee.

A Rainy Weekend in Melbourne

We had a quick trip to Melbourne on the weekend to meet a new niece / cousin and play tourist!

But before that, I had 24 hours away from the kids to accompany my mum to see her old school friend perform with Andre Rieu!

We had fabulous seats, in the middle of Centre Court at Rod Laver Arena...

...and Mum got to catch up with Gary (although it was brief and the whole time he was being hounded for photos by adoring fans).

It was a great concert and we enjoyed ourselves but I really don't understand the mass-hysteria surrounding Andre.  Nanna's screaming in adoration of Andre, much as a 13-year old girl might do for Justin Beiber - quite surreal!

Trev bought the kids over the following day so I managed an afternoon of shopping at one of the big DFO's and was very pleased to have found a good raincoat for Kelvin - otherwise he would have been very wet over the weekend!!

New raincoat from Kathmandu, grumpy face is models own!!

We stayed in a great hotel off St Kilda Road - can highly recommend it and if you book far anough in advance you can get great room rates.  It's away from the inner city hustle and bustle, close to the Botanical Gardens should energy need to be expended by little ones, right on a busy tram line and the comfy rooms included a little kitchenette.  The only thing we'd do differently next time would be avoiding the cafe at breakfast time - the business suits did not appreciate hungry hypo pre-schoolers!!  Needless to say, Weetbix and milk were purchased for consumption in our room and everyone was happy.

Mirrors on the ceiling of the lift provided entertainment everytime!

We met our new niece / cousin, Maisie.

Caught lots of trams.

Went to the Zoo in the rain.

And had pasta on Lygon Street.

We also got to catch up with Pa (my Dad) but didn't really manage any decent photos!

It was a fun weekend and despite the weather I don't think we'd have done anything differently if the sun had been out.  I love Melbourne as a place to visit but I also love being home and we lapped up the sunshine on Sunday once we were home.

Pedestrians!

Just a quick post so you know I'm still alive!  I'm reading lots of theoretical traffic engineering guff at the moment - with less than 4 weeks to get my case study finished and hopefully a Masters awarded I am head down bum up in the books.

But this I just had to share...

Pedestrians are the world's greatest 'Pythagorians' - always preferring the hypotenuse!

- Professor John Adams

From here